DARPA's Shredder Challenge solved two days early

The race to crack the world's hardest puzzle has finished - two days earlier than expected. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Shredder Challenge saw nearly 9000 teams competing to reconstruct five shredded documents using a combination of computer science and jigsaw-solving skills, but one team surged ahead of the rest and were proclaimed the winners on Friday night, claiming a $50,000 prize in the process.

The team, known as "All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S." is made up of three programmers based in San Francisco: Otavio Good, creator of the visual translation tool Word Lens, Luke Alonso, a mobile phone software developer, and Keith Walker, who works on satellite software at Lockheed Martin.

Their winning algorithm automatically suggested matching pieces of the shredded documents based on factors such as the shape of the rip or the marks on the paper. The trio then tasked a group of friends to assemble the suggestions by hand. "Our background writing computer vision, computer graphics, and general simulation software definitely helped us," explains Good.

The name All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S. turned up in an email sent by someone who gleefully confessed to sabotaging another team in the competition headed up by Manuel Cebrian at the University of California, San Diego. Good, however, strongly denies any involvement. "We worked our asses off to win this fair and square and it's unfortunate that someone who sabotaged UCSD's effort implied that they were us," he says. "I doubt that any of the claims they made about their identity were true. They were just causing trouble on the internet." Perhaps we'll just have to chalk it up to internet pranksters.

So with DARPA's documents reconstructed, are shredders now insecure? No, says Good. "The challenges that DARPA gave us were actually simple compared to if
you have a bin full of lots of shredded pieces of paper. Reconstructing
these documents was not easy at all. I don't think you have much to
worry about with your shredded documents."

Is there anything UK Citizens can do to stop illegal cyber-tracking stalkers with an assortment of damaging technology and motives?
Tracking and recording the duration and types of not sub vocalisation,ERV etc and external obsessive activities with corporate corruption would cost a fortune -
Where are citizens rights criminal laws human rights at in UK about this type of criminal activity?

Rodney
on December 5, 2011 1:00 PM

Im wondering, just what method was used to shred the paper? Just linear? or cross cut?

Something to ponder, approximatly 25 years ago a home computer was released for widespread sale, which used dynamically reprogrammable graphics hardware to not only use collision detection between various parts of computer graphics but also to detect patterns of various bit sequences to recover the synchronisation pulses from entire tracks of data from floppy drives.
In the 1980s the graphics chipset was used to synchronise generated computer graphics with incoming video graphics, so you could stand in front of your TV, with a camera and video capture unit, and wave your hand around and hit clouds etc.

trackdisk.device has been updated over the years in order to be able to use CDs, and now DVDs as rewritable media. This software, hardware combination can do hundreds of millions of brute force comparisons every second, over data sets comparable to human DNA.

This is a home desktop computer, that doesnt use Windows.

This is a machine that is a tiny fraction the power of whats available in industry, university, and national security.

The power of a modern computer is very carefully hidden by modern programming methods.

Zbird
on December 13, 2011 4:34 AM

Not surprised that DARPA is working on "unshredding" shredded paper virtually - makes a lot of sense. But I'd be surprised if CIA or NSA didn't already have this kind of capability. Seems like some very basic operations:
1. Scan shredded paper
2. Detect paper edges
3. Align edges by most likely matches and verify alignment with OCR (or CAPTCHA for that matter)
4. Profit!